This will be of interest to those of you who attend Comic-Con International in San Diego and who scramble for hotel rooms nearby. Mayor Jerry Sanders has proposed a new hotel tax to help pay for the current expansion of the city's convention center. He's talking about 3% for hotels right near the center, 2% for those a little farther away and 1% at hotels so far away that you might even be able to get a room at one of them.
The expansion plan has a current completion date of 2015, which probably means 2017 but some of the increased space is supposed to be available well before either date. When it's done, the "gross floor area" (and some of it's pretty gross) would increase by 961,187 square feet — from 1.76 million square feet to 2.72 million square feet. Most of the added space is expected to be filled by extremely large people in Star Wars costumes.
Actually, it includes 225,000 additional square feet of exhibitor space and a new 80,000 square foot ballroom. And since there will be 100,101 square feet of new meeting rooms, I plan to host an additional 200 panels each year.
I am told the hotel tax (or something like it) looks likely. Apparently, there are still a lot of questions about how the city is going to pay for the convention center upgrade and they're also talking about surtaxes on taxis that serve the area and on restaurants in the vicinity. The current cost estimate is 24% less than the original $711 million price tag but they don't even have all of the lower bill fully funded. A few months ago, a reporter in San Diego interviewed me about the Comic-Con and told me (approximately), "The city was so worried about losing big conventions — Comic-Con, especially — that they rushed through the expansion deal without totally figuring out how they were going to pay for it." Sure looks that way. The $711 million figure, by the way, does not include the cost of the new pedestrian bridge between the convention center and the Gaslamp Quarter. That's another $40 million.
In the meantime, because parking and hotel space around the convention center are not utterly unobtainable, another group has proposed the construction of a new $800 million buck football stadium between Petco Park and the convention center. Yeah, that's just what they need down there.